An article on PC Gamer talks with Mojang's Markus 'Notch' Persson and Tobias Möllstam about 0x10c, their upcoming space simulation. "The goal is to have it feel a bit like Firefly," says Notch. "You can try to land on a planet but you mess up and, instead of having the ship just explode like it would in real life, the landing gear gets broken. Then you have to try to fix that by finding resources. Instead of the adventure being flying from here to here, it’s: I set the destination, oh god I hit a small asteroid and the cloaking device broke. I think they really nailed that kind of emergent aspect in FTL." They also include a link to this trailer showing footage of a "first draft" of an "art test" for the game.

We haven't seen enough to dismiss the game based on its graphics alone, unless one is a graphics whore.

I'm not dismissing it entirely, but the video made me extremely pessimistic that I'll ever play it because the visuals are terrible. In the 21st century I don't think I need to play a butt-ugly game, and I don't think that makes me a 'graphics whore'. I married a pretty woman but I don't think that makes me obsessed with looks. I play FTL, which has simplistic graphics, but it isn't ugly, just 'minimalistic'. Many indies have proven that you can make a game with a very small graphics budget look nice. Obviously he is aiming for the broadest market appeal here by making the game able to run on low spec machines (which was part of Minecraft's massive success I think), but I don't think considering myself outside his target audience means I'm obsessed with graphics; it's just that ugly visuals make a game far less appealing. Understanding that it is an early video, considering how Minecraft looked, I doubt I should expect this project to get a whole lot more visually exciting. If it does, great.

Minecraft didn't grab me; Terraria (the 2D Minecraft ripoff) totally did. I much preferred Terraria because even though it wasn't a graphical powerhouse its graphics were charming in their simplicity and it wasn't ugly.

“The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated.” - Mahatma Gandhi